Tadashi Isa was born in July 10, 1960 in Kyoto, Japan.
He graduated from the Faculty of Medicine, the University of Tokyo in 1985 and obtained the MD license. Then he entered the PhD course of the University of Tokyo, the Institute for Brain Research and obtained the PhD degree in 1989 with the studies on the neural substrates for the control of orienting head movements. He worked as a visiting scientist at the Department of Physiology, University of Goteborg, Sweden in 1988-1990, the laboratory of Professor Anders Lundberg. During this period, he studied the role of the corticospinal and the propriospinal systems in the control of target reaching and food taking movements of the forearm of the cat.
In 1990-1993, he came back to the Department of Neurophysiology at the Institute for Brain Research, the University of Tokyo as an assistant professor and continued the work on the neural control of orienting head movements.
In 1993-1995, he moved to the Department of Physiology, Gunma University and worked on the molecular physiology of AMPA type glutamate receptors, especially in the hippocampal interneurons.
In 1996, he became a professor at the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Okazaki. Since then, his studies are centered on the neural mechanism of saccadic eye movements and dexterous hand movements, mainly by using the non-human primate model. He has expanded these lines of studies to the neural mechanism of functional compensation after brain and spinal cord injury, the neural mechanism of attention, awareness and consciousness, development of brain-machine interfaces and development of novel technologies for manipulation of gene expression with viral vectors.

Mentors;
Dr. Akio Sato (@ Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology)
Prof. Hiroshi Shimazu (@ the Institute for Brain Research, the University of Tokyo)
Prof. Toshinori Hongo (@ the Institute for Brain Research, the University of Tokyo)
Dr. Shigeto Sasaki (@ the Institute for Brain Research, the University of Tokyo)
Prof. Anders Lundberg (@University of Goteborg)
Dr. Bror Alstermark (@ University of Goteborg, currently @ Umea University)
Prof. Seiji Ozawa (@ Gunma University)

Publications